Thursday, 31 July 2014

Since the article: "We Are Better Than This" by Hilary Stauffer in the Huffington Post only allows for a 250 word comment I decided to put my reply on my blog. Here it is:

So do I start with the good or the bad?

I am sorry to say that I am mildly unimpressed by Hilary Stauffer's attempt to intellectualise a complex human problem. And I am a little bewildered at the italicised poetic ditty at the end of each paragraph. There is an evident risk of a subtle smug self-righteousness weaving its way through this article.

On an intellectual basis Hilary Stauffer is on safe grounds by raising lots of reasonable and relatively indisputable affirmations. I guess experience as a "legal adviser" and as a "lawyer" would contribute to that. Many people wish the mob wouldn't go for their torches and pitchforks so readily but it is predictable and needs dealing with rather than dismissing. Of course both sides are wrong in some respects and I am often dismayed by this notion that finding something wrong with the other side appears to justify some other wrong on this side. Something missing is the realisation that we are all wrong sometimes and it doesn't prove that someone else is right.

Given that the whole situation with Israel and Palestine is a devastating tinderbox it is not enough to effectively excuse or justify one side or both with the implication of 'six of one and half a dozen of the other'. If it were as simple as that one could, I guess, let them get on with it. This vague amelioration avoids the fundamental problem that is giving rise to the unacceptable inhumanity.

There is unacceptable inhume behaviour happening. That is what first motivates people to react. Some (the approach that I wish to favour) are stunned and wounded by the human tragedy that is being perpetrated. Some (in my view sadly) appear to react to the fear it triggers in them and they dehumanise the victims whilst looking for justification to appease their pain (some might call it conscience). But, ironically, the majority of reactions, to give credit to the ditty, actually indicate that we are better than this. It is because we care, and fear for others as well as ourselves, that people have such strong feelings. So there is something that could be humanly (whether legally or not) called a crime being committed.

And here perhaps lies the crux of the matter. The Israeli government's slaughter of so many innocent civilians in such appalling conditions is wholly disproportionate and violent in the extreme. They are the sophisticated, powerful, educated, 'civilised' dominant partner. Israel is, by virtue of the relationship, the 'responsible' party. They have to find a better way.

I hear so much polarising, analogising and personifying of the situation one could be forgiven for forgetting this is about the dynamics of large populations and powerful vested interests. Some do tend to imagine themselves as Israel living in a house being threatened by their scummy, primitive and violent neighbours who would ransack their house and kill all their children given half the chance. Some imagine themselves as the Palestinians as the rape victim being tied up in the cellar and abused by a malevolent self interested psychopathic predator. But trying to disentangle the situation by cognitively flip-flopping about two possible analogies only really illustrates the apparent intractability of the problem.

One has to get one's head outside of the problem and see it from as many perspectives as possible. It then becomes clear that the violence must stop. Given the shocking level of slaughter (I calculated: 16 times worse than the blitz per day) by the Israeli army it is incumbent upon them to stop this right now. There is simply no legitimate excuse for this level of inhumanity. This is such an extraordinary imbalance of power that it beggars belief that anyone could suggest there is any semblance of equivalence between the parties or any 'argument' thereof.

I have read up on Theodor Herzl and Zionism and it is clear the philosophy is based on the strange notion that there is 'us' and the rest of the world. I am not a political animal or analyst but any philosophy, be it about nature, people, science or whatever that discards part of the whole as 'the other' is an incomplete philosophy doomed to failure. Unfortunately the concept or manifestation of Israel must 'belong' to its environment and that includes the people around it. The same applies to the Palestinians (much as they may wish Israel, as a state, had never been imposed on them). Israel is, of course, entirely funded by that superpower the USA (plus some). The USA, along with the UK and Europe are clearly building an 'empire' and control of the Middle East is vital. Although I don't for one moment suppose Israel could easily 'integrate' it certainly can't whilst it is an American outpost. So the summary is that the West (they have called themselves the New World Order) is forcibly imposing itself on the Middle East with Israel as the unfortunate front man.

Before the 'Jewish State' had even been manifest the Zionist philosophy was to spirit the indigenous population away by means of subtle appropriation of land and property and by denying the indigenous populating any employment. Not only is this announced in their philosophy but it is quite clearly evidenced in their behaviour. When the impoverished and subjugated population around them cry out that they want to destroy their oppressor there is no human justification for slaughtering their children because of some projected interpretation of what they might do if they were powerful. This is the response of a dominant oppressive regime to stifle any possible future imagined threat.

Israel has indulged in the use of illegal weapons including, but unlikely limited to, "White Phosphorus", "Flechette" and "DIME" against civilians. These are acknowledged transgressions. They have also indulged in behaviour that is internationally deemed illegal one way or another by targeting schools and hospitals which under the current circumstances are in no way justified by their feeble claims that there are weapons in those buildings.

The overview is clear and Hilary Stauffer would be better employed using her superior legalese to state the case against Israel because, in this instance, they are unequivocally wrong. If any Islamic state were doing this to Israel (after generations of impoverishment) it would be equally wrong. The fundamental issue is that this behaviour is not something the human race wants to indulge in - not consciously anyway.

It is such a pity to see such beautiful intellectual prose, with added poetic ditty, put to such sinister and feeble amelioration of such inhumanity. I am opposed to this insane slaughter and will remain so forever regardless of who is perpetrating it.

Tuesday, 29 July 2014

There are many ways to look at any situation and that certainly applies to the current devastation of Gaza. I watched a live stream from someone's phone in Gaza last night and it was heartbreaking. It was frightening and tragic; almost incomprehensible. And I thought of the Blitz in the Second World War and how people regard that as so inhumane and appalling. So I wondered how the two compared. I was quite surprised at what I found. The death toll per day in Gaza is about a third of the death toll per day in the Blitz. So it appears less severe until you consider the size of the population. The Blitz occurred across the whole of Britain in spite of the general association with London and the 'blitz' on Gaza is applied across the whole of Gaza in spite of claims that it is targeted. Per head of population the death toll in Gaza is about eight times higher than during the Blitz in the UK per day. And that is only the current counted dead.

There is no way to 'measure' this kind of crime but it can be helpful to compare aspects. Given that some of the 'injured' are likely to become the 'dead' and considering that all of those people's lives have been unacceptably damaged I compared the 'injured' too. The death and injury in Gaza is sixteen times greater than the equivalent measure of the Blitz. It is also worth remembering that the British population were relatively stable and secure whilst the Gaza population have been under siege for many years and their lives are already impoverished and injured.

It is ironic that Operation Protective Shield, the euphemism for terrorism and genocide, is represented as some kind of surgical extraction, a modern sophisticated targeted strike against an aggressive military opponent. The German Luftwaffe executed the Blitz as a perfectly random bombing of civilians (as well as useful military targets) with the express intent to cause as much devastation and terror as possible. Israel denies any attempt to damage the civilian population and yet manages to kill and maim sixteen times more people per head of the population than the German's did with their intended random blitz of the UK.

In WWII Britain was subjected to 267 days of random bombing of the civilian population.
It is historically regarded as abhorrent.
The British didn't like that.
In Operation Protective Edge the Gaza population have, so far, been subjected to 21 days of targeted bombing of the civilian population.
Britain (officially) approves of that.

Friday, 18 July 2014

I am currently listening to some 'United Kingdom' person talking at some conference. It is about the trouble in Gaza and it is on Reuter's live stream but there seems no information saying what the 'conference' is. But in some way it seems irrelevant because they are talking mealy mouthed rubbish.

It is so sad that these human beings seem to think they are being constructive in some sort of diplomatic way but they appear to deliberately miss the central point entirely. They say they condemn Hamas firing rockets into civilian areas of Israel. They say they support Israel's right to defend itself. It could just as easily be said the other way around. And, much as I condemn Hamas' use of rockets, it is pointless saying that they should stop because that is exactly what Israel wants.

It is, to be undiplomatic, akin to telling a rape victim to stop attempting to claw the eyes out of the rapist. "I seriously condemn the clawing out of eyes." "Further more I implore you to cease and desist from clawing eyes out so that we can have less damage and time to talk things over." So the victim stops clawing eyes out and gets fucked some more.

Britain has been disgustingly silent over Israel's illegal incursions into Gaza and the West Bank. Israel continues to steal land, occupy it, build on it, exclude the local population from living on it. In addition they blockade Gaza such that they cannot survive to any level of acceptability. They have the utterly paranoid excuse that they are afraid the Palestinians might get violent and disturb their existence but that is the same as the rapist refusing to untie their victim because they might attack them. Of course they might - they've just been raped. It is no justification to slaughter people because they might attack you.

If the 'world at large' seriously opposed Israel's illegal activities then they may have some justification in asking Hamas to stop the violence. But you cannot 'blame the victim' - Wait what? Oh - Of course - That is how our culture works. I was born in Britain and I thought I was British. I now feel like a refugee in a disgusting country. They steal children, they sell them for sex, they use the pictures for blackmail, they privatise all the essential services, they privatise the police, the prisons, the hospitals, the railways and anything and everything they can turn into profit for the elite oligarchs. They 'sanction' the poor, they introduce Bedroom Tax, they gain access to personal bank accounts, they accuse victims of child sex rings of making a lifestyle choice. What is happening to humanity?

It is decomposing at an alarming rate. Gaza, the Ukraine, Syria, Iraq - what the fuck? Maybe, just maybe, this is the legacy of all those people who came before and didn't give a fuck. Maybe we are all one and this is what we wanted. But it is also theoretically possible to put a stop to this insanity by refusing to comply with the linguistic nonsense that authoritarians spout every day. Perhaps if we stop believing the utter paradoxical fantasy of money, the ridiculous contradictory claims of authority, the nonsense of binding contracts, the unrealistic stupidity of 'ownership' ... perhaps, if we frame our understanding of the world in a more coherent fashion we can find a way out of this dystopian matrix of illusion.

Wednesday, 16 July 2014

This is going to have to be a very brief blog because it is late and I am tired. I'm unhappy, depressed, anxious and pissed off. I don't want to be involved with politics. I have always hated politics. Everyone arguing and coming up with complexity after complexity and it goes on and on and on.

I don't want to be sitting here writing a blog post and putting it all together and updating the blog when all I want to do is eat some fish on toast and go to bed. But then I don't suppose the residence of Gaza want to be involved in politics either. Well not the politics of putting up with a superpower bombing their country, killing babies, maiming people, destroying houses and frightening the life out of everyone. How the fuck are they expected to sleep hey - Benjamin Netanyahu?

It is disgusting what is going on in Gaza at the moment and there is no excuse for Israel to be acting in this belligerent, cruel and inhumane way. There was a time long before the internet when they could more easily get away with things like this both because less people knew what was going on and because it was easier to control the biased representation and pathetic justification.

I was browsing stuff when I came across these tweets and was alerted to the threat to the Al Wafa Hospital in Shajiya. I searched the internet (briefly) and came across the following articles. It appears Israel has not only threatened the Al Wafa Hospital with a missile strike (which is THE definition of terrorism) but it is possible, as I write, that they have, in fact, bombed the hospital.

Israel is out of control and dangerous.

The blog title is "Is the Al Wafa Hospital in Shajiya under attack?" and whether it turns out to be the case is not even the point. The point is that a super power named Israel is out of control is terrorising an entire population. Remember the uproar when Bush pretended some terrorists had attacked New York? Well this terrorism is for real so I think the people of the planet Earth have got to get themselves galvanised against this heinous trend of states oppressing and abusing the populations of the Earth.

Saturday, 5 July 2014

The answer lies in the psychology of the beast. People have an understandable tendency to think their conscious model of reality is governed by the same laws as the reality it models. They consequently think that if it is blatantly obvious to them that 'x' plus 'y' equals 'z' that if they can get an accurate comprehension of 'x' and 'y' across to another 'rational' mind that the same result will emanate. There is something missing in this understanding and the best short description may be the subconscious.

We have most of us had the experience where someone else was enthusiastically advising us to take a course of action to achieve a certain goal but we couldn't see it. On examining this conundrum it is often clear that had we taken the action with our lack of understanding it would not have had the successful result predicted. That is because consequential actions would not have had the philosophical foundations that gave rise to the decision to take the original action. In other words one person may understand that jumping now is the best thing to do but they understand it is in preparation for the next jump. Someone who jumps on someone else's advice will not be expecting to have to jump again and will fall at the first hurdle.

Ed Balls clearly does not have the same philosophical model as Michael Meacher. I don't know enough about politics to name the various schools of thought and philosophical premises underlying various political theories but it is clear that the 'Labour Party' has shifted significantly since Blaire turned up on the scene. Blair metaphorically sold his soul to the devil when he decided that to get Labour into power to achieve what maybe he thought was a laudable objective he would break the philosophical fundamentals of honesty and a belief in the 'will of the people'. Like that old bloke Uncle Adolf he was so convinced this country needed to rid themselves of the Tories that he would do 'whatever it took' to get into power. I guess he may have thought that on gaining power he could revert to his original 'honest' position but unfortunately life doesn't seem to work like that. Blair fell down his own miserable labyrinthine pit and appears to now be utterly enveloped in some delusional world of Godliness but that is another story.

The whole Labour party was unfortunately infected with the cancerous deception and consequential doublespeak. They lost their conviction that the people came first and that everything else would follow and believed their own myth that somehow they had to 'make it work' for people. This is the slippery slope to domination. Although the perceived 'objects' of their political philosophy remained largely intact they seemed to lose the underlying philosophical mode of operation. They began to think like the Tories. They began to fall for the matrix like illusion of money, power and influence. They began to think they had to achieve their objectives in what is mistakenly considered 'the real world' of hardnosed financial decisions. It is comparable with the Judas problem in Christianity - the belief that you can explain to your enemy why you are right in their terms. They have been operating under the tragic misconception that things must make money to succeed. It is an illusion projected by the very powerful world of finance and it is a misunderstanding of 'wealth'. The wealth of any country is the people in it - not the money they owe or own.

Ed Balls and the majority of the rest of the Labour party still believe they are essentially 'socialist' but they are not. They are trying to make 'socialism' work in someone else's philosophical paradigm. Ed Balls is, unfortunately, emotionally off key (that's a polite way of putting it) and as such he cannot see how nationalising the railways could possibly work financially. He cannot, therefore, make that decision with any conviction. But he does partly understand and works hard at trying to figure out how it can be done. There is no amount of 'telling' him that can possibly change his perception - that is something only Ed Balls can do - and so even if he took other people's advice and nationalised the railways he would screw it up.

What Michael Meacher has to do is realise there is a perception problem here and figure out how to address it. I don't know, but if I get any ideas I am sure to post them on this blog. I hope that goes some way to answering Michael's question.

Wednesday, 2 July 2014

Dani Dayan, the chief foreign envoy of the Yesha Council (a Hebrew acronym for the umbrella organization of municipal councils of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and formerly in the Gaza Strip) was interviewed on Radio 4 today (Wed 2 July 2014: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b047zlbv - at 2 hrs : 47 mins : 19secs in ). Asked about the general mood of his community he said:

"First of all there is a feeling of consternation. We are still shocked. We are still appalled at the death of three teenagers that were just in their way home from school. It's a barbaric act that first and foremost makes us very very sad. There is also a feeling that there is a necessity, an urge, for our government to fight terrorism in a more assertive way and a better way. We have to make sure that terrorism is counterproductive. That is the way to combat terrorism, to make it counterproductive. Not, of course, against innocent populations but against the perpetrators. The perpetrators should be apprehended, should be brought to justice, but not only the actual perpetrators of the specific act but also the human infrastructure that allows them to act."

There is a proposal that there should be a new settlement built in the West Bank in honour of the three murdered teenagers and Dani Dayan agrees and expresses the view that it needs to happen to make it clear that terrorism is counterproductive.

That is a remarkably stupid, ruthless and aggressive attitude. Since he is a representative of a self named "Jewish" organisation would it be reasonable to suggest that he is representing a collective paranoid abreaction. He is not speaking as an individual and conveying his personal opinion (which he is at liberty to do outside of his official role) but as a representative of a Jewish organisation. Jews have traditionally been accused of collective paranoia (amongst other things) and it is well understood that judging people by some vague sense of perceived cultural traits is rarely useful in solving cultural problems. To be blunt it is prejudicial - like racism, sexism or anti-Semitism. Dani Dayan is blaming Hamas (prior to any evidence and in spite of their denial of any connection to the three murdered teenagers) and proposing an offensive land grab against other Palestinians (the "innocent population" that he claims shouldn't be acted against) to somehow "teach them a lesson". It is so blatantly paradoxical it beggars belief. It is also very hard line and oppressive. It is precisely what right-wing organisations indulge in. Given that Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel, has said "Hamas is responsible and Hamas will pay"(again without evidence) and has consequentially launched more than 30 air strikes against the Gaza Strip, would this be the actions of a far right-wing aggressive and violent state?

It seems, on all accounts, that this response by Israel is what would have been expected by most observers of the situation. This response is not what the Palestinians want and is clearly exactly what the Israelis want. Given the general state of politics in the Middle East this event is looking more like a false flag than anything else at the moment.

So I would like to know if Mossad killed the three teenagers to justify this new and aggressive assault on Gaza and to engender popular support for more "land grab" from the Palestinians. The more I learn about the workings of world leaders and politicians in general the more sceptical I become.